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The last Tommy Steele fan club closed its doors years ago and nobody makes pilgrimages to the Two I’s coffee bar any more.
The beatniks are gone and Jack Kerouac is a member of the literary establishment. His books are taught in English classes. He’d have hated it.
The great hates and the great loves of today will one day seem just as quaint, just as silly. They are only fashions and fads. Fashions die, fads die out.
So why is Star Trek still with us after nearly a quarter of a century? It seems to break all the rules and it won’t go away.
As far as I can tell there are two sorts of enthusiasms. For want of any better words, I call them wide and narrow. A wide enthusiasm embraces a whole range of things (science fiction). Conversely, a narrow enthusiasm is concerned only with one thing (Star Trek). Now don’t get picky and tell me that science fiction is just one thing—it isn’t; at least not in the sense in which I am using the term here.
The wide enthusiasms just seem to go on and on. Sometimes they stagnate; often they grow; but they are always with us. The narrow ones either disappear entirely (like Tommy Steele) or get absorbed into the wider ones (like Jack Kerouac).
The ephemera, the ones which vanish, tend to be the more moronic ones. The ones which last and which become part of the establishment usually show at least a glimmering of intelligence. Pop stars and soap operas are perfect examples of this. Who now remembers Don Lang and his Frantic Five or The Grove Family? (Which one was the pop group and which one the soap opera?). I remember them, and I wish I didn’t. But the Beatles and Coronation Street have transcended the dictates of mere fashion and have become the standards against which other aspirants are judged. In a sense, they are the field, and they have jumped the enthusiasm gap and transformed narrow into wide. Not an easy trick.
Again, Star Trek breaks all the rules. It is a narrow interest in the sense that it is only one thing, one programme. It is undeniably intelligent; and yet it continues to go its own way and stubbornly refuses to become absorbed into a wider field of interest. Why?
Television and film are the new boys on the block. Film is only about as old as the century, and television is less than half that age. The other arts have histories going back for (in some cases) thousands of years.
When the newer media try to compete with the old established ones on their own ground they often come off second best. They are bucking too large a weight of tradition. The film versions of Romeo and Juliet lack the frisson of a theatrical performance. In the fifties a new generation of playwrights gave the world a new phrase to play with. The angry young man was the paradigm and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. But the film version of Look Back in Anger, although it made Richard Burton a star, simply does not work. It is loud instead of angry and the difference destroys it. Therefore while the play remains one of the landmarks of twentieth century literature, the film is largely forgotten.
Film and television are at their strongest when they display their own unique attributes instead of trying to mimic others. The surrealists knew what they were doing when they made Le Chien Andalou. It could not have been done at all in any other medium. (Just as an aside, I recently learned how they made the donkeys in the film appear to be in such an advanced state of decomposition—they covered them with paste so that the flesh looked all smeary. Isn’t that fascinating?)
On a less cerebral level, films such as Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of 1933 work so brilliantly because they portray stage acts which simply could not take place in a theatre. The sheer extravagance of Busby Berkely’s sets make it physically impossible; and yet the film still insists that what we are seeing is a stage show. The contrast is superbly handled and is a perfect example of film being used in its own terms instead of in the terms of other artistic media.
But again, Star Trek breaks the rules. It is solidly rooted in the old SF traditions. (In many ways it resembles nothing so much as a pulp magazine serial, albeit a rather superior one.) It is not really televisual, just visual, and towards the end of its life showed distressing tendencies towards the banal and bathetic as Captain Kirk fell in love (again) and saved the universe for God and The American Way Of Life (boring). Despite this, it refuses to die. Why?
The so-called media fans pay homage to a wide variety of programmes. The vast majority of these exhibit all the traits that I identified in the above paragraphs and they will not last. Things such as Robin Hood with its half-digested mysticism nicked wholesale from Frazer’s Golden Bough and its unimaginative and derivative plots. Abortions such as Space 1999 in which Gerry Anderson, having previously exhibited real technical genius in making puppets behave like people, succeeds in making people behave like puppets and falls flat on his wooden face.
This is not to denigrate media fans. I fully approve of many of their enthusiasms (though I often wish they could discuss them rationally instead of reacting with such hysterical unthinking passion to any hint of criticism). Television programmes such as The Prisoner have long passed beyond mere media fandom into a wider artistic acceptance. Again, virtually the only exception seems to be Star Trek, with a weird half-life all of its own.
In his poem The Second Coming, Yeats asked:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I believe that Star Trek is one of these rough beasts and it was born in the Bethlehem of the Desilu studios at exactly the right time. The reason for its longevity is simply that its hour had come at last, and it suited the mood of the times. It all goes back to 1957, the International Geophysical Year…
In that year, Sputnik 1 went into orbit and America went into shock. The Russians did it first! How could that be? The American space programme was under the direction of the Navy at the time, and in the searchlight glare of television, the American nation watched the rockets of Project Vanguard blow up on the launching pad. How come the Russians could do it when Americans could not? America felt humiliated and the space race was on.
Until this national disaster, America had proceeded complacently, certain that this was the Golden Age and America was the Golden Place, Eden come again. The American way was a universal rule and anybody who disagreed was a commie pinko. America, love it or leave it.
Because it was so secure and complacent, America was insular. As a nation, it didn’t really take anything outside of itself terribly seriously. It played with the idea of launching a satellite in the International Geophysical Year and was sure that it could do it (this was America after all), but there wasn’t any real hurry.
The national heroes were baseball stars not scientists. Intellectual achievement was sneered at, considered wimpish. Real men didn’t study, they drove cars and played football and went to drive-in movies and made out in the back seat during the second feature. (I’m sorry if this sounds sexist, but the times were sexist.) People who studied stayed home on Saturday night had spots and didn’t get the girls.
But in the years following 1957, America was forced to abandon this view. It was a time of national trauma. It quickly became obvious that any society which denigrated brain power didn’t stand a chance in the latter half of the twentieth century. As they looked for an excuse (any excuse) to explain their failure to keep up with the Russians, the spotlight fell on the German rocket scientists liberated from Peenemunde at the end of the Second World War. Their Germans, said America, are cleverer than our Germans. That’s why the Russians did so well. It wasn’t true (if anything, America got the cream of the Peenemunde scientists) but it would do to be going on with.
Almost overnight, America changed. Brains, specifically scientific brains, were in. America stopped looking inwards and started looking outwards. Specifically, it started looking towards space and it stopped being a dilettante. This was serious.
It was in this atmosphere of a national rethinking and redefinition of what was important that the idea of Star Trek was first conceived. According to The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, the idea first occurred to Roddenberry in 1960. It would be several years before the idea bore fruit and the show came to air (the first series was broadcast in 1966) and by that time the generation raised on the new ideas that followed from the catastrophe of 1957 was of an age to appreciate what it was seeing.
A few years earlier and the show would have been dismissed as either incomprehensible or (more likely) irrelevant. The national mood would have been against it. A few years later and it would have been dismissed as commonplace. In 1969 Americans landed on the moon. What was all the big deal about space? It was all routine.
But the timing was exactly right. Star Trek caught the national mood, and because it was in the right place at the right time it became enormously popular. It helped, of course, that the show was intelligently conceived and well produced. It had strong story lines and interesting themes. The characters were well portrayed. However the timing was the most critical factor. Public consciousness was so attuned to the ideas that the show was promulgating that it couldn’t help but succeed. It was the icon of that generation. It showed where we were heading and justified the effort needed to get there. It was about important things and it held up a mirror to the national mood.
Because it so exactly fitted into the spirit of the times, it probably is not really relevant to ask why the programme survives despite its disregard of the rules that seem to govern other superficially similar programmes. Star Trek breaks the rules of fashion that I started off talking about and succeeds because it is a social phenomenon rather than an artistic one. A different set of rules apply.
Trekkies are an experiment in applied sociology.
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